Preface to the PamphletMemorandum of Police Department Superintendent Lopukhin

Written:Written in February-March 1905Published:First published in 1905 in the pamphletMemorandum of Police Department Superintendent Lopukhin. Published byVperyodGeneva. Signed:N. LENIN.

      Published according to the text of the pamphlet.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Foreign Languages Publishing House,1962,

      Moscow,Volume 8,

      pages202-205.Translated:Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor LaskerTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2003).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Therecan be too much of a good thing, or so Mr. Lopukhin seems to say in his
memorandum. A good thing from the point of view of the police is the
“temporary” Security Regulations, which, since 1881, have been one
of the most stable fundamental laws of the Russian Empire. The police are given
all kinds of rights and powers to “keep the populace in hand”,
according to the apt expression of the memorandum, which is all the more
striking the more often one stumbles over the incredibly ponderous and clumsy
official turns of speech in which the memorandum is written. Yes, the police
have lived in clover under these “Regulations”, but their
“good” features have spoiled them. That is one aspect of the
matter. Another is the fact that the emergency measures of suppression, which
may have seemed extraordinary twenty-five years ago, have since become so
ordinary that the population has adjusted itself to them, so to speak. The
repressive significance of these emergency measures has weakened, just as a new
spring weakens from long and excessive use. The game is not worth the candle,
Mr. Lopukhin, Superintendent of the Police Department, implies in his
memorandum, which is written in a curiously melancholy and dismal tone.

Howgratifying to a Social-Democrat is this dismal tone, this dry,
business-like, yet nonetheless devastating criticism by a police official of
Russia’s fundamental police law. Gone are the palmy days of policedom! Gone are
the sixties, when the very existence of a revolutionary party was unthought
of. Gone are the seventies, when the strength of such a party,whose existence was an undoubted and terrifying fact, was “only equal to
individual acts of violence, but not to a political revolution”. In those
days, when “underground agitation found support only among individual
persons or circles”, the newly invented spring could still produce some
effect. But how slack this spring has now become, “in the present state of
society, when dissatisfaction with the existing order of things and a strong
opposition movement are be coming so widespread in Russia”! How absurd and
meaning less these emergency security measures proved to be when they had to be,
actuallyhad tohe, applied in thousands of cases “against
workers for engaging in strikes of a peaceful nature and purely economic in
motive”, when even cobble stones had to be classed as dangerous political
weapons!

Inhis despair, poor Lopukhin resorts to a double exclamation mark, which
invites Messieurs the Ministers to join him in laughing at the absurd
consequences to which the Security Regulations have led. Everything in these
Regulations has proved useless ever since the revolutionary movement really
penetrated among the people and became inseparably bound up with the class
movement of the working masses—everything, from the rules requiring the
registration of passports to the military tribunals. Even the “institution of house janitors”, that blessed godsend to the police, is
scathingly criticised by thePolizei-Minister, who accuses it of having
an enervating effect on the preventive activities of the police.

Intruth, the complete bankruptcy of the police regime! This bankruptcy is
confirmed, apart from the assertions of such a highly competent person as the
most honourable Mr. Lopukhin, by the entire course of development of the tsarist
policy. When there was no really popular revolutionary movement, when the
political struggle was not yet connected and integrated with the class
struggle, simple police measures against individuals and study circles had their
use. Against classes these measures proved ludicrously in effective; by their
very profusion they became a hindrance to the work of the police. The once
awesome clauses of the Security Regulations have proved to be just miserable,
petty, quibbling chicaneries, which tend to stir up discontent among the
“plain people” ’who do not belong to the revolutionariearather than seriously to affect the revolutionaries them selves. Against the
      people’s revolution, against the class struggle the police cannot be
      depended on; one must have the backing of the people, too, the support of
      classes. Such is the moral of Mr. Lopukhin’s memorandum. And such is the
      moral which the autocratic government is drawing from practical
      experience. The springs of the police machinery have lost their snap;
      military force alone is now insufficient. One must stir up national
      hatred, race hatred; one must recruit “Black
      Hundreds”[1]from among
      the politically least developed sections of the urban (and, following
      that, naturally, of the rural) petty bourgeoisie; one must attempt
    to rally to the defence of the throne all reactionary elements among the
    population at large; one must turn the struggle of the police against study
    circles into a struggle of one part of the people against the other.

Thatis precisely what the government is now doing when it sets the Tatars
against the Armenians in Baku; when it seeks to provoke new pogroms against the
Jews; when it organises Black-Hundred gangs against the Zemstvo people,
students, and rebellious Gymnasium youths; and when it appeals to the loyal
nobles and to the conservative elements among the peasants. Ah, well! We
Social-Democrats are not surprised at these tactics of the autocracy; nor shall
we be frightened by them. We know that it will no longer help the government to
stir up racial animosity since the workers have begun to organise armed
resistance to the pogrom-bandits; and by relying on the exploiting sections of
the petty bourgeoisie the government will only antagonise still broader masses
of real proletarians. We have never expected any political or social
revolutions to come from “convincing” the powers that be, or
from educated persons turning to the paths of “virtue”. We have
always taught that it is the class struggle, the struggle of the exploited part
of the people against the exploiters, that lies at the bottom of political
transformations andin the final analysisdetermines the fate of all
such transformations. By admitting the complete failure of the pettifogging
police methods and passing over to the direct organisation of civil war, the
government shows thatthe final reckoningis approaching. So much the
better. It is launching the civil war. So much the better. We, too, arefor the civil war. If there is any sphere in which we feel particularly
confident, it is here, in the war of the vast masses of the oppressed and the
downtrodden, of the toiling millions who keep the whole of society going,
against a handful of privileged parasites. Of course, by fanning racial
antagonism and tribal hatred, the government may for a time arrest the
development of the class struggle, but only for a short time and at the cost of
a still greater expansion of the field of the new struggle, at the cost of a
more bitter feeling among the people against the autocracy. This is proved by
the consequences of the Baku pogrom, which deepened tenfold the revolutionary
mood of all sections against tsarism. The government thought to frighten the
people by the sight of bloodshed and the vast toll of street battles; but
actually it isdispelling the people’sfear of bloodshed, of a direct
armed encounter. Actually, the government is furthering our cause, with
agitation of a scope wider and more impressive than we could ever have dreamed
of.Vive le son du canon!say we in the words of the French
revolutionary song: “Hail the thunder of the cannon!” Hail the revolution!
Hail the open war of the people against the tsarist government and its
adherents!

[1]Black Hundreds—areactionary, monarchist, pogrom-making
organisation set up by the tsarist police to combat the revolutionary
movement. They murdered revolutionaries, assaulted progressive intellectuals,
and organised anti-Jewish pogroms.